A Thousand Suns
by SolemnTestament
Summary: As a world is torn apart under the weight of clashing armies, what will become of two lives that have become intertwined?


But to name you,

we, reverent, are breathless,

weak with pain and old loss,

and exile and despair—

our hearts break but to speak

your name, (H.D.)

* * *

She could feel the crushing weight of his burden as her rider—no, The Rider— wandered among the veritable sea of bodies scattered along the streets of the fallen, ruined city. The dead were piled around the corners of buildings like the vicious swells of some terrible, foreign ocean. Blood had seeped into the cracks between paving-stones and hardened into a dull patina. The steeple of a nearby cathedral had been shattered by the particle launched by a trebuchet, and the dull bronze of a bell was still visible, faintly glimmering in the crepuscular light of the coming evening.

She could not doubt that the screams of men still echoed in his ears, as they did in hers. She, a _Shadeslayer_. Her name was now bound to two honorifics, each carrying a separate majesty. He was still wearing his battle armor, sapphire-blue stained with garnet Rorschach-stains, dented in places and rent in others, courtesy of Varaug's cursed blade and other wayward strikes of steel on steel. She was clad in black leather, a similarly-colored headband preventing her eyes from being shielded from the outside world by her raven-colored hair.

She watched from afar. So often, she watched her—no, _the_—Rider and his dragon. In battle, in peace, in hope, in despair. In infatuation, his whirling emotions just beneath the skin of his now-angular face. Elfen but _different. _Eyes flashing at the sight of the wretched beggars on the side of the road, or the wounded civilians crying out for aid, whom he always aided, or anything that offended his ideals of justice. Or at her.

She feared for The Blue Rider, their last hope, the man (elf? What was he now, really?) who represented the last gasp of the free world. She had witnessed his demeanor after his defeat at Du Völlar Eldrvarya. A fight in which she had not been able to lend her aid. A fight for which he was not prepared, and in which he fared terribly. Or the most recent loss of Oromis and Glaedr, a tearing-away which she could mourn but not fully understand. Or his loneliness, which she could not assuage. She feared his coming fight against The Red, and knew that it would end in one of them being sent to a shallow, unmarked grave. There was too much enmity now in that relationship for any other outcome to resolve itself.

Her mind whirled back to Gil'ead. The hill of testimony. At her lowest, he had come to her. A mere boy, a rough human, not even of age. Running from forces the power of which he knew not, towards a destiny which he could not even imagine. He had barged into her life as rudely and abruptly as his frequent declarations of adoration. As much as she begrudged him these lapses in judgment, all she could remember was her defilement at the hands of The Shade, her collapse and dissolution under months of abject torture, her wish to have the purple-eyed one just end her once and for all instead of cruelly bidding her to reveal secrets which she could not divulge for lack of knowing, irrespective of her lack of desire to betray her cause and her people.

She had long ago realized that their meeting would be the event that defined her existence. Not the death of her father on the fields surrounding Illeria. Not her relationship with Faölin, so cruelly aborted by the evil king's machinations. Nor her wandering the land over the decades. Not the Yawë. Nor her captivity at the hands of Durza. _Him_, the Rider, from his first clumsy intrusions into her shattered mind.

She had come to this conclusion as she watched him war with the Shade under the bloody light of the Dwarves' beloved star rose. Barely holding his own against a foe wielding powerful, ancient, depraved magicks, able to succeed with her assistance as the creature's blade split his back in two. He constituted an unrivaled power in her life; she could hear the plants murmur of the Rider's existence as they journeyed to Ellesmera; she could not but notice the way the light itself seemed to bend around the Rider and his sapphire Partner-of-Mind, as if the world was rejoicing in the return of a sacred bond, without which nature itself would be incomplete. Which it was, of course. The Binding of the dragons and the elves had changed the fabric of Alagaësia itself, and the world as such was diminished with the decline of both at the hands and weapons of the wicked.

The Rider's curse marked the logical endpoint of the journey under which her return to the world was subsumed. As such, her existence was to be subsumed under his, subordinate to his, lesser than his not _per se_ but as a result of his Fate. It was only logical, she thought, for her to devote herself to the literal embodiment of a cause that had consumed the vast majority of her life.

She feared for him, _her _Eragon.

That was all that mattered. And he was all that mattered.


End file.
